2021/10/07 by Kate Pearce, Tiffany Zhan, Pearce, Kate +5 · 3 citations
Computer Science · #Advanced Text Analysis Techniques #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Expert finding and Q&A systems #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2110.03142
openalex publication_date 2021/10/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Question Answering (QA) is a task in natural language processing that has seen considerable growth after the advent of transformers. There has been a surge in QA datasets that have been proposed to challenge natural language processing models to improve human and existing model performance. Many pre-trained language models have proven to be incredibly effective at the task of extractive question answering. However, generalizability remains as a challenge for the majority of these models. That is, some datasets require models to reason more than others. In this paper, we train various pre-trained language models and fine-tune them on multiple question answering datasets of varying levels of difficulty to determine which of the models are capable of generalizing the most comprehensively across different datasets. Further, we propose a new architecture, BERT-BiLSTM, and compare it with other language models to determine if adding more bidirectionality can improve model performance. Using the F1-score as our metric, we find that the RoBERTa and BART pre-trained models perform the best across all datasets and that our BERT-BiLSTM model outperforms the baseline BERT model.